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Design007-Jan2018

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JANUARY 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 39
ing as a screen for a new design's acceptance
can provide time-to-market-sensitive OEMs
with a rapid and cost-effective means to assure
consistent, reliable design from their ODM and
design services partners. The systemic reveal
of defects and marginalities presents an objec-
tive, thorough and measured indicator of the
new design's ability to meet performance tar-
gets. The CAD-agnostic capability can work
directly with clients' ODM partners to estab-
lish in-process analysis support, fully compat-
ible with their unique design processes, which
ensures optimized first pass design success.
Summary
One of the primary goals of any product
development team is to reduce the number of
design respins before releasing a product to
market. Given that the root cause of design
respins is often schematic design errors, a pro-
cess that includes fully automated schematic
verification can significantly mitigate the inci-
dence of this costly issue. Xpedition schematic
integrity analysis enables full inspection of all
nets on a schematic using pre-defined checks
and an extensive intelligent model component
library.
New designs can be modeled and continu-
ally analyzed to assure that last-minute design
changes are fully assessed. Data from mul-
tiple board designs can also be integrated to
perform system-level validation. Furthermore,
schematic integrity analysis can be performed
on designs after they have been released into
the market to improve the quality of the elec-
tronic design, increase yield, and decrease
product returns.
Today's complex designs no longer allow for
manual schematic review and verification. DESIGN007
Craig Armenti is a PCB marketing
engineer for the Board Systems
Division of Mentor. Armenti has more
than 25 years of experience in the
EDA industry. He has held marketing
and application engineering
positions with several major telecommunication and
software companies.
Developing a Secure,
Un-Hackable Net
With the EU and UK committing €1 billion and £270
million respectively into funding quantum technology
research, a race is on to develop the first truly secure,
large-scale network between cities that works for
any quantum device.
"When quantum computers are fully developed,
they will break much of today's encryption whose
security is only based on mathematical assump-
tions. To pre-emptively solve this, we are working on
new ways of communicating through large networks
that don't rely on assumptions, but instead use the
quantum laws of physics to ensure security, which
would need to be broken to hack the encryption,"
explained lead author Dr. Ciarán Lee (UCL Physics &
Astronomy).
"Our approach works for a general network where
you don't need to trust the manufacturer of the
device or network for secrecy to be guaranteed. Our
method works by using the network's structure to
limit what an eavesdropper can learn," said Dr. Matty
Hoban (University of Oxford).
The team used two methods—machine learning
and causal inference—to develop the test for the
un-hackable communications system. This approach
distributes secret keys in a way that cannot be
effectively intercepted, because through quantum
mechanics their secrecy can be tested and guaran-
teed.